New Brunswick Liberal Leader and premier-designate Susan Holt speaks to supporters in Fredericton on Oct. 20Stephen MacGillivray/The Canadian Press
Susan Holt, the Liberal Leader who saw her party elected to a strong majority in New Brunswick on Monday, made a lot of promises during the election campaign. She also made one just before the election was called that stands out in particular.
Ms. Holt said in early September that, if elected to power, her government would launch a “rigorous and proper scientific investigation” into the mysterious brain disease that appears to be affecting more New Brunswickers every month.
She was effectively saying she would restart a federal-provincial probe whose sudden cancellation in 2021 by the defeated Progressive Conservative government of Blaine Higgs was just as mysterious as the ailment itself.
Ms. Holt is now the premier-designate. She will form a new government in the coming weeks. This issue has to be at the top of her agenda, because people’s lives are at stake.
Since 2015, when a neurologist in New Brunswick saw his first patient suffering from an unexplained neurodegenerative disease that causes a range of debilitating symptoms, the number of cases has risen steadily year after year.
Alier Marrero, the neurologist in question, said this summer that he now has more than 430 such patients in his care. Of them, 111 are under 45, some are just teenagers, and 40 have died.
The symptoms are horrible. They include crippling pain, muscle atrophy, loss of co-ordination, partial paralysis, hallucinations, blindness, memory loss, cognitive impairment, dementia and psychosis.
Many patients are perfectly healthy before they suddenly fall gravely ill. Husbands and wives, or other genetically unrelated people in the same household, get sick together, ruling out a genetic predisposition. A lot of the original cases were grouped geographically in two areas, raising the spectre of an environmental cause, such as a contaminant in the air or water, or in food.
The situation was so alarming that the Higgs government agreed in 2021 to take part in a federal-provincial investigation involving zoologists, pathologists, epidemiologists, environmental health specialists and others that would work to determine whether the cases were related and search for a possible cause.
But later that year, the province suddenly shut down the broader investigation without explanation and launched its own, much less thorough, probe of 48 known cases. In 2022, it curtly announced that there was no evidence of a disease cluster and therefore no need for further investigation.
The Higgs government continued to look the other way even as the number of cases increased almost tenfold. It ignored the entreaties of victims and their families to take the issue seriously.
In a stark contrast, Ms. Holt’s promise to reopen the investigation was detailed.
Dr. Marrero found at one point that as many as 90 per cent of his patients had traces of glyphosate in their blood. Glyphosate is a pesticide used routinely in New Brunswick’s forestry industry that has been linked to neurological diseases, according to studies in the United States and elsewhere.
It’s also known to promote the growth of blue-green algae, which produces a neurotoxin linked in studies to cognitive and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and which can get into seafood.
“We need to understand whether this is coming from blue-green algae or glyphosate or environmental factors,” Ms. Holt said in September. “We need that to be done properly and with peer review and scientific process, but we need to be doing it in a way that is public to New Brunswickers who have been asking questions about this and been left in the dark for too long.”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Ms. Holt will have a busy agenda as a new premier, with plenty of other promises to keep. But the issue of New Brunswick’s mysterious brain disease has risen to the level of a moral obligation.
The Higgs government failed the people of New Brunswick by never providing an explanation for shutting down a credible and thorough investigation into what is clearly a serious situation.
Ms. Holt needs to fix that callous error quickly, restore faith in the provincial government and do all that can be done to prevent more people from getting sick.